Okay, now for the redebut of Snow writing 18 paragraphs about Smackdown! :yay:
Mauro Ranallo, you RULE!
Even after peeking at (and forgetting) the spoilers, I had this feeling of dread starting this show. "Welcome to Smackdown!" the cool generic rock song plays and - even though I like his promo a lot last week - I'm immediately expecting Roman Reigns to come out for a promo to start the show, since Tweener Roman is good enough to not get his promo edited off the show again. That would be funny!... But instead of Roman, we get to see Maryse. Upgrade! :yay: :gusta:
Maryse and Miz going on and on about how great Miz is was actually comically hilarious, I thought. These two are a great act together! But the thing is, The Miz is the one guy on the show that can always get heat for anything he does, and this act being so cool is starting to cancel that... whatever, maybe it's just me. Then Ryder comes out and... All in all, I actually thought Ryder came across GREAT on this show!!! The guy was just serious enough to come across (relatively) pissed that he got screwed over, yelled at Miz for a bit, then Miz accepting the challenge and then backing off "because Ryder's already scheduled for a match" was PERFECTLY done and made me add that strikeout up there ^. The match was booked great, where Corbin took control almost immediately, looked dominant and ragdolled Ryder around, but Zack got enough hope spots in against the Big Bad Wolf or whatever that proved he's infinitely better than the Ryder of old. Both guys were put over here. Ryder isn't supposed to look dominant. He's Bayley, with a different colored headband.
Then Ziggler came out and it hit me that, despite how much I'm LOVING WWE - and pro wrestling as a whole - right now, there are some dumb ass feuds going on right now lmao.
Ziggler and Corbin is still a thing? Really? There's like 5 feuds going on right now which are "I attacked you, now I attacked you back!" at the most set up for Payback (that looks super good on paper, but still)
quick, someone guess my favorite segment of the night
So Emma comes out wearing cool looking shoulderpads, doing the full NXT entrance and EXPLAINS her feud with Becky, cutting much better promos than she did with Dana, and then beat the hell out of Paige. Five stars!
There's something super great about "Slamming your face into the turnbuckle as hard as you can" being a finish, especially when it comes off this aggressively and this well. She's working so damned aggressively. Out for Blood Emma is a really cool change of pace for all the finesse workers of the Divas division, and as mentioned with NXT many times her badass squashes outshined the shit out of Asuka. This was so much better than all of those! Obvious markdom is obvious but I can't put this over strongly enough haha. And Paige, I'm expecting to see you back up in Full Sail within 3 months, because going back to watch your weak ass offense and random screaming here just blew my mind that you were ever over to begin with. Nice girls finish last.
I LOVE TOURNAMENTS! And Enzo promos. And 2 weeks in and I love these two MORE than I did on NXT. Calling for these guys to be screwed on the main roster is looking really, really bad right now.
Line of the Night: "There's a million and one things we can call you, but the absolute worst thing we can say is that you're the Ascension."
WWE style tag match here, Big Cass has a top three hot tag and runs through everyone and move on to the Dudleys on Raw.
Wow, we had another debut here... Alberto El Patron has arrived in WWE! Maybe it's because of San Diego or maybe he wanted to have a dream match with AJ Styles, but holy crap where has THIS Alberto Del Rio been! This dude actually brought it today and if you have 20 minutes to kill feel free to go out of your way to watch this PPV-quality encounter, Cool spots aplenty! The closing moments of this match were some of the most exciting action I've seen in a WWE show. Yay!
Then we got bullshit backstage with Fandango and the Golden Truth, and since I haven't been catching SD and these assclowns always get cut from Hulu, are these segments always like this? This was Eric Young bad. Bleh.
then Vaudevillians came out and... It's hard to describe this, but it came across like the Vaudevillians were playing a strategy game when everything goes perfectly. They had a battle plan, hit their tandem offense, Fandango had the worst hot tag EVER before getting dispatched and the Villians instantly hit the Whirling Dervish and had a great, dominant victory. Yay! They advance and look really strong and I feel SO bad for Goldie and the person who puts all the paint on him just for this. Maybe Golden Truth will wind up doing the entire Jordan and Gable storyline, but instead of them actually team up, we can get the Rhodes Brothers back.
Okay... The main event really didn't do it for me. I was kinda struggling to pay attention to it, especially with the peanut gallery bickering on commentary and during Sami's entrance this insane hottie was on TV and what was I saying? Oh, right... This felt like the stereotypical "Smackdown match" between two great wrestlers having a good match (I guess?) that ends in DQ and a brawl, but...
All I can think of watching this was Dean Ambrose. Man, this guy went from my favorite wrestler to my least favorite in under 2 weeks. Man after being buried by Brock Lesnar and having that atrocious match that let us all down at Wrestlemania and going from "Take me to Suplex City, baby!" to parking tickets and flyers and whatever that AWFUL segment was on Monday... This guy's just got massive X-Pac heat with me. Go away. I couldn't help but pop at all the times Owens buried him on commentary. It's gotta just be a personal thing, but hey.
If you want to check out this match, go ahead. Maybe you'll find it to be a great ending to a great Smackdown where everything in the ring was really good to great and lots of stuff made you feel. 9/10!
And it hit me watching this show that between 2 weeks of fantastic TV from WWE, that insanely good New Japan PPV, a classic at Takeover: Dallas, the typical quality from Lucha Underground... This may be the most I've ever enjoyed pro wrestling. Please, every single one of you keep this up! :yay:
